How to Survive Playing a Sadist

When my friend Craig Zobel approached me about playing the role of “Officer Daniels” in his new film “Compliance,” I was initially reticent. After a decade of playing assorted bad guys and miscreants on television and in films, I had decided to try and reshape the public’s — if not only the business of show’s — perception of me. Playing “The-guy-you-think-did-it-but-didn’t-really-do-it” on dozens of television crime procedurals is good work if you can get it but not exactly challenging after an extended stretch.

Luckily, my second career as a screenwriter afforded me the luxury of walking away from the daily grind of auditioning and I was able to find roles in films like Mr. Zobel’s “Great World of Sound” and Ti West’s “The Innkeepers” that were likable and closer to my own self — still full of foibles and delicate shadings, but well-meaning. Mr. Nice Guy, I was on my way.

Then “Compliance” came along and all bets were off. I was reluctant to take this role on. I recognized the brilliance of Craig’s script and greatly valued both our friendship and working relationship. But I was about to play the worst human being in my repertoire. One of the most vile people on earth. What’s more, Craig let me know that there was the possibility that I might never be seen. (The majority of the film’s 90 minute running time revolves around a twisted prank phone call.) If he ultimately found it more effective to just hear my disembodied voice, he was going to go that way. So I wasn’t doing this for career reasons or vanity. I just wanted to be involved in this experiment. Luckily he decided my beautiful, sneering mug would be on display for all to see in the end.

The cast and crew were all aware of the events on which “Compliance” is based: A series of hoaxes in which a man claiming to be a police officer prank called fast food restaurants across the country. He usually informed the in-house manager that one of his or her employees, often a young woman, was a thief. The caller was “on his way,” but in the meantime, he instructed the manager and anyone else he or she could enlist to interrogate, strip-search and otherwise humiliate the subject in ways too gruesome to recall here.

As “Officer Daniels,” the prank caller and orchestrator of the heinous malfeasance that occurred, I would be saying horrible things in horrible ways. I’m not a Strasberg method actor where I have to be called Officer Daniels on set and believe I am the character for the entire length of the shoot day and night. But my method requires the emotions to be real. The camera picks up microscopic thoughts and feelings, so I would have to live in the mindset of this deranged individual for some time. Such deep hatred, contempt for humanity, violence, misogyny. It was my belief that only a person with intense self-hatred could hate others to such a degree.

Most importantly, like Craig and the other actors involved (Most notably the brilliant and brave Ann Dowd, Dreama Walker and Bill Camp), I was curious why these people did what they did. We were all diving into an experiment of our own. We had a great script. Now it was time to interpret it and make sense of the behavior. Make the illogical logical and help the audience, as well as ourselves, understand how this could have happened. Both the shooting of the film and our subsequent travels to film festivals over the past many months have consistently enlightened me as to what the film is all about. Audiences are still bringing up things I hadn’t thought about, like how the film explores deeply relevant points about our all-too-willing sense of obedience to authority, the role of gender in power-dynamics and a host of other hot-button issues in specific and blistering detail.

But I learned something significant about myself, the character I was playing and a societal problem at-large on my first day of shooting. On set, all of the calls were recorded “live” and my “lair” was actually on a downstairs soundstage in Brooklyn, with the manager’s office of the ‘Chickwich’ restaurant built above. But then the phone broke, and on a film with a relatively minuscule budget like “Compliance,” there’s no time to wait around for it to start working again. I had to go upstairs into the office and read my lines off camera while the other actors pretended to talk to me on the telephone. I could see them. I was watching them. I was spewing my hateful, vile directives and invectives. And I felt physically ill. I immediately knew why the perpetrator did what he did the way that he did. He did it over the phone. At a far distance, sometimes several states over. He wasn’t viewing the events as they unfolded. He wouldn’t have been able to hack that. He was a coward who got his jollies at a remove. And in contemporary society, isn’t that one of our biggest problems?

That’s one of the many things the film is about to me. Perhaps the events of “Compliance” might not have needed to happen if we were actively engaging with each other in a direct and more personal fashion more often. Maybe someone couldn’t create this mayhem in so many other’s lives if he had to do it to their face. Maybe others might not have reacted as they did if they were paying more attention to each other’s faces and actions and not just listening to their words with half their attention span as they typed away on their Blackberries. Maybe not. But it’s something to think about.

About Speakeasy

Speakeasy is a blog covering media, entertainment, celebrity and the arts. The publication is produced by Barbara Chai and Jonathan Welsh with contributions from the Wall Street Journal staff and others. Write to us at speakeasy@wsj.com or follow us on Twitter at @WSJSpeakeasy or individually @barbarachai.